Chapter 2
Ruby’s Wilderness Grill and Gas and Groceries was halfway to nowhere. There were only a few roads crossing Alaska, and Ruby had apparently picked the site for her business based on where her truck broke down.
Maybe it was just the right place, because plenty of trucks broke down nearby, and they always seemed to get exactly the right amount of traffic to stay in business.
It was one of the first establishments over the Canadian border, and tourists would often stop simply because it was their first taste of Alaska.
It was also the only public flush toilet in fifty miles, and a sign out front boasted that information shamelessly.
Meghan worked as a short order cook and cashier, filled propane tanks on RVs, and even ran the tow truck once in a while; everyone at the place had to be able to do everything, because chances were good that someone wasn’t going to be able to get to work on any given day.
Jessie lived out a low dirt road that washed out twice a year at least, Henry stopped coming to work if they were hiring firefighters locally, and although Ruby’s policy was that you came in if there was less than a foot of snow no matter what, a collapsed roof had gotten Jessie out of a week of work, and Meghan herself had once called in because an angry mama moose had trapped her in the cabin with Sheppard for an entire day.
Meghan pulled her Subaru up behind the sprawling establishment and waved at Henry, who was shoveling spring snow from around the gas pumps.
He made an urgent gesture to go inside, and Meghan automatically went to open the back door of her car before she remembered that Sheppard wasn’t there to release.
Everything in her life was a minefield of memories. When she walked into the back door of the restaurant, the first thing she did was automatically check to see if his water dish was full, but of course there was no water dish at all.
Jessie looked up at her entrance, momentarily confused because it came with no scrabble of toenails on the floor, and no thumping of Sheppard’s half-tail against the walls as he ricocheted in to say hello before he took his place underneath the back cabinets to lay down and spend a lazy day.
Jessie’s look turned to sympathy, and Meghan knew that her face was a swollen, red mess from crying.
They didn’t speak of it.
Already, there had been enough sympathy exchanged to last Meghan a lifetime.
“Saw a wolf on Derrick’s Creek,” Meghan thought to warn Jessie as she took off her coat and hung it by the door.
“A wolf! Wow.” Jessie didn’t seem particularly bothered by the idea. “Did you get a picture?”
Meghan shook her head, sitting to pull off her boots and switch into tennis shoes. “It was gone too fast.” And I was busy fumbling Sheppard’s ashes, she didn’t add.
“Well, you’ve got a visitor,” Jessie said. “And he’s a weird one.”
“A visitor?” Meghan looked up in alarm. She could only think of one person who might be looking for her, Grayden, and it had been almost ten years since she’d heard from him. She’d gotten Sheppard in part for protection, before she realized what a useless protector he actually made.
“Some guy,” Jessie said, sending chills down her spine before continuing, “He showed up completely naked at the back door and wanted to see the sad woman with the sunset hair.”
Meghan touched her hair self-consciously. She had dyed it when she moved to Alaska, as part of her attempt to escape her past, and changed the color every few months as her blonde roots grew in. Right now, it was vivid orange with red tips. Sunset hair seemed an apt description.
“Wait, naked?!”
Jessie grinned. “Absolutely starkers. And let me tell you, honey, if you aren’t interested in him, you aren’t just a nun, you are dead inside. He is gorgeous and he is built.”
Definitely not Grayden, unless he’d changed considerably since Meghan had finally left. He’d always been adamant that Meghan stay fit and keep her weight down, but he’d never bothered to apply that same criteria to himself.
“It’s like 30 degrees out there,” Meghan said incredulously.
“We let him in and put him in whatever clothing we could scrounge up to fit him. He’s up front trying to figure out silverware.”
“He sounds… special.”
“He’s pretty confused,” Jessie agreed. “But he insists that he needs to see you.”
“This day just keeps getting weirder,” Meghan said, putting an apron around her waist. “Let’s go see Mr. Naked and Built.”
Jessie’s naked man was crouched in one of the booths by the window, holding a fork curiously up to the low angle sunlight streaming over him.
Jessie had found an eclectic collection of clothing to put him in. One of Henry’s lined flannel shirts was tight over his shoulders, battered and worse for wear. A pair of snow pants made him decent, though they were clearly Jessie’s and half a foot short. His feet were bare.
When Meghan came into the dining room from the kitchen, he turned with his nose in the air and vaulted down from the table with unnatural grace.
As he padded across the room to her, Meghan’s breath caught in her throat.
He had white in his thick, shaggy brown hair and in his short, scruffy beard, but did not appear to be that old. Even through the borrowed flannel, she could tell that Jessie had not exaggerated his physique. He was tall and his eyes—were they brown?—reflected the diner lights like mirrors.
Not well-groomed enough to be hipster, and not quite gaunt enough to be homeless, what Meghan could not deny was that he was, under the unkempt hair, absolutely gorgeous. His cheekbones were the stuff of poetry, and his nose was perfect and straight.
Meghan was apparently not dead inside; her body’s reaction was immediate and undeniable.
He came across the room as if Meghan was drawing him on a leash, and fell to his knees at her feet. That put his face near her waist and to Meghan’s surprise and consternation, he put arms around her and drew her close, sniffing deeply.
“No!” Meghan said, as if he was a dog. “Bad weirdo! Leave it!” She pulled away, stepping back to break his grip, and he let her go, looking up into her face with confusion and longing.
“I’m…sorry,” he said, rocking back onto his heels and rubbing his face. “I’m…not…I haven’t been this in a long time. It’s all very confusing.”
“I don’t know you,” Meghan said firmly.
“I know you,” he answered softly, with a look that was nothing short of adoring.
It unsettled Meghan to the bottom of her stomach, dampening the ardor that had bloomed there.
“You may think you know me, but I think you’re probably just really confused,” Meghan said gently. “Do you have some family we could call?”
He blinked at her. “My pack is far from here,” he said thoughtfully.
“Were you hiking?” Meghan guessed. “Fell and lost your pack?” A head injury might explain why he had stripped off his clothing and was acting so oddly, though it didn’t explain his weird fixation on her. “Do you remember your name?”
The man made a noise in the back of his throat, and looked as surprised by the sound as Meghan was. “I don’t think that’s right,” he added.
“Let’s call you Fred,” Meghan suggested. “We’ll get you some food and call the state troopers to come get you. You’ve probably got family that’s worried sick for you.” She ushered him back to the booth and this time he looked around at the other people in the room and sat carefully on the bench.
“Fred?” Jessie asked incredulously as Meghan retreated back into the kitchen. She, like the two early tourists who were holding menus they weren’t looking at, had watched the exchange with avid interest. “He is so not a Fred. He’s a…Rick. Or a Gaston.”
Meghan rolled her eyes. “Let’s not make fairy tales out of this, Jessie. Have you called the troopers yet?”
“Of course,” Jessie said. “But weird, naked, non-violent strangers 150 miles from a station are pretty low on their to-do list. They said it would probably be tomorrow before they got out here, but that they’d check the missing persons list.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t seem like a threat, exactly,” Meghan agreed.
It was unsettling the way he didn’t stop watching her for more than a few moments at a time, but it wasn’t aggressive, and he’d backed down immediately when she had indicated her discomfort with his touch, so it was hard to feel threatened.
She filled the tourists’ order and made a heaping plate of eggs and reindeer sausage and hash browns for Fred. It was hard not to watch him fall upon them, and she busied herself doing inventory and making sandwiches for the display case.
She had to pause, throwing away the scraps that she would have brought Sheppard when she was done, and then busy her hands with more inventory.
“Jessie said I could wash dishes?”
Meghan stood up abruptly from the cabinet where she was looking for an unopened box of individually-wrapped saltines and scraped her forehead on the closure.
“Oh, damn,” she said, rubbing it self-consciously.
Then she remembered her grief-swollen eyes and told herself that a scratch wasn’t going to make or break her appearance.
“You’re hurt?”
Fred was holding his empty dishes, looking uncertain and concerned.
“No,” Meghan said. “Just scraped myself. Not even bleeding.” She checked her hand to make sure, but there was no blood and it felt like a minor graze, barely stinging now.
“No,” Fred echoed, and he reached one hand to gently touch her chest. “You’re hurt.”
Tears sprang unbidden to Meghan’s eyes. “It’s nothing,” she said around the sudden tightness in her breast. “I just…I lost my dog. He was old. It wasn’t unexpected.”
“You loved him.”
His words were simple and, unprepared for them, Meghan could not stop the wave of grief that broke over her.
Fred put his plate down on the counter and enfolded her into an embrace that Meghan needed too badly to push away. She felt all the strength in her legs ebb away and he held her up as she sobbed helplessly into his shoulder.
It was a long, shuddering moment before she could catch her breath again, and she was aware of Fred, nuzzling the side of her neck in a way that was both deeply intimate and absolutely respectful. His beard was unpleasantly scratchy.
When she could stand again, she only had to shrug a little and he let go and stepped back, watching her face carefully for clues.
Meghan dried her face in her apron. Her eyes stung with the abuse she had put them through the past several days, and she knew that if she had been somewhat less than model-perfect before, she was definitely a fright now.
But when she gave Fred the smile she had been practicing with the rest of Ruby’s staff, he smiled back, and it was warm and affectionate and full of interest.
Meghan had to remind herself that she did not need to be drooling after a wild-haired, bearded, lost hiker who would get picked up by the troopers the next day anyway. This was a common thing in times of grief, right? Crazy animal lust to affirm the strength of life or something.
Well, she sure had the crazy animal lust thing going on.
Fred made a motion forward and Meghan realized that he was going to kiss her, just in time to put up all of her walls and sidestep smoothly. “I’ll show you where the sink is,” she said.
She left him washing dishes to go clean the bathrooms.